Freedom
fighters the world tried to forgetWhen its last
commander died this week, Ukraine's shadowy insurgent army received
something rare: public recognition. Lubomyr Luciuk explains how
national heroes became strangers in their own land

By LUBOMYR
LUCIUK

Saturday, September
15, 2007– Page F5

Clearing rubble in her farmyard, high in the Carpathian
Mountains of western Ukraine, Hanna Kishchuk hit something hard with
her hoe. She had snagged two glass jars. The contents of one were
decayed, but the other held 216 photo negatives.

Peering at the images, which showed men and some women in
uniform, Hanna's son, Petro, caught sight of a familiar insignia, the
Ukrainian tryzub or trident, which he knew from stories he had
heard as a child was the insignia of the Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia
(UPA), the fabled Ukrainian insurgent army.

The Kishchuks knew their farm once belonged to a man who
disappeared after the Soviets discovered he was a Ukrainian nationalist
and whose wife was later deported never to return. Could these be
long-lost photos of the shadowy guerrilla force that fought for
national independence until it was wiped out more than 50 years ago?

This week, thousands of mourners paid their final respects to
the UPA's last commander, Vasyl Kuk, who died Sunday at the age of 94.
Mr. Kuk, who was captured in 1954, sentenced to death and jailed for
years before being released, was described by President Viktor
Yushchenko on Tuesday as the "personification of the Ukrainian idea."

Such official praise is a relatively recent development,
considering that not so long ago the mere mention of the rebellious UPA
was a major faux pas in a land emerging from decades behind the Iron
Curtain.

To many Ukrainians, the guerrillas were just what their
communist rulers once called them: fascist collaborators, bandits and
war criminals. To the rest of the world, they were all but unknown.

But Petro Kishchuk had grown up hearing the other side of the
story - how the UPA had fought the Nazi invaders and then the Soviets;
how, at its height, it may have had 100,000 people bearing arms.
Honeycombing the countryside with bunkers, many of them still in place,
the partisans became so adept at guerilla warfare that Soviet military
instructors reportedly taught their North Vietnamese allies both UPA's
techniques and the methods they had used to liquidate them. Many of
those anti-insurgent tactics are still used in Iraq and Chechnya.

It turned out that the photos in the jars unearthed by Petro's
mother were of UPA Company No. 67, which operated along the border of
Ukraine and Romania. Finding them 50 years later was remarkable, but
perhaps even more surprising was the fact the pictures were taken in
the first place. UPA regulations generally prohibited photography -
clearly the soldiers and their civilian supporters faced grave risk
should their likenesses be captured.

Why were the rules broken? No one knows, but it seems certain
that those who buried the jars knew their struggle was drawing to an
end and wanted to preserve evidence of who they were and what they were
fighting for.

Most of the people in these photographs died in combat or were
missing in action. Anyone captured was interrogated and then either
executed or exiled to the Soviet gulag. Those fortunate enough to
survive internment were prohibited from returning home or speaking
about their insurgent experiences, at least until the Soviet Union's
collapse.

Their story begins in September, 1939, with the violent
dismemberment of Poland by Nazi Germany, assisted by the Soviet Union.
Western Ukraine had been in Polish hands, but was incorporated into the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic through a staged plebiscite, even
as a relentless persecution of anyone - Ukrainian, Pole or Jew -
considered an enemy of the Stalinist regime was launched. Deportations
and mass murder continued until Adolf Hitler turned against his Soviet
ally on June 22, 1941.

To the Nazis, most Ukrainians were Untermenschen (subhumans)
and their country a future Lebensraum (living space) for an
Aryan master race. They herded Ukrainian patriots into concentration
camps, despoiled the country's resources and press-ganged millions into
slave labour in the Third Reich. Ukraine suffered greater civilian
losses than any other nation in Nazi-occupied Europe, a fact obfuscated
by those who still refer to "20 million Soviet war dead," or even more
disingenuously, to "20 million Russians" lost in a "Great Patriotic
War."

By October, 1942, the UPA had emerged as a national liberation
army. After the war, its armed struggle would be reduced, finally, but
only after the Soviet secret police and collaborators had brutally
depopulated western Ukraine, destroying the insurgents' civilian
support networks, and hunted down the last fighters, a campaign that
lasted more than a decade.

A study by Jeffrey Burds, a professor of Soviet history at
Northeastern University, underscores the intensity of the battle for
Ukraine after the Germans had been defeated. From February, 1944, to
May, 1946, Soviet troops killed 110,825 UPA "bandits" and captured
250,676 more. As late as February, 1947, UPA "remnants" were still
holding off nearly 70,000 crack troops.

The fighting took place in an area slightly larger than New
Brunswick and the nationalists suffered a heavy blow on March 5, 1950,
when Mr. Kuk's mentor and predecessor as commander, General Roman
Shukhevych, was killed.

Whether the UPA stood any chance of success is debatable.
Certainly, its soldiers believed they would prevail - their oath was
"Attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it." And Soviet
imperialism, they hoped, would be contained, even rolled back, by the
West. But they got no significant outside help. Indeed, they were
betrayed by British traitors like Kim Philby, who alerted his Soviet
masters to what few American and British efforts were made to aid the
Ukrainian insurgency.

Eventually those who survived the years of armed struggle were
ordered to demobilize, go back to civilian life and remain in deep
cover. There they suffered a further indignity - hearing others speak
well of their struggle for Ukraine's independence, but only out of
earshot of the regime's men

Today, 16 years after Ukraine re-emerged from the Soviet
Union, the image of the UPA remains contested. People who served in the
state by ferreting out nationalists receive pensions, but no such
benefits are accorded their prey. Just as UPA veterans such as Mr. Kuk
strived to overcome the lingering propaganda, there are still those who
continue to recite it, because it masks their own complicity.

This situation will not last. For more than a decade, ordinary
Ukrainians have taken it upon themselves to honour their partisans.
Those best placed to know what the UPA represented - family members,
neighbours and descendents - have erected dozens of memorials across
the country to those who resisted foreign occupation.

And stories continue to be told about UPA heroes like one of
the men in these pictures.

Khmara (Cloud) was the nom de guerre of Company 67's leader,
Dmytro Bilinchuk, who took up arms in 1941 after the Soviets deported
his family to Siberia. He stayed underground when the Germans invaded
and was captured by the Gestapo the following year. However, he was
soon rescued while being transported to a prison in Kolomyia and
returned to the forests for 10 more years on the run.

Finally, in 1952, he was betrayed and again taken prisoner.
After being interrogated in the infamous Lukianivka prison, he was shot
on June 24, 1953. It was 46 years to the day later that Hanna Kishchuk
hit something with her hoe.

Khmara's executioners probably thought they could erase the
memory of the Ukrainian liberation movement from the annals of history.
By consigning their images to the soil they were fighting for, the
members of Company No. 67 proved them wrong.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of geography at the Royal
Military College of Canada. This article is adapted from Their Just
War: Images of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Kashtan Press, 2007),
co-written with Vasyl Humeniuk.